- Series
- Additional Talks and Lectures
- Time
- Thursday, January 26, 2012 - 2:05pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
- Location
- Skiles 005
- Speaker
- Satyan Devadoss – Williams college – Satyan.Devadoss@williams.edu – http://web.williams.edu/Mathematics/devadoss/
- Organizer
- Josephine Yu
We consider the moduli space of surfaces with boundary and marked points. Such spaces appear in algebraic geometry and topology, playing a strong role in holomorphic curves and open-closed string theory. We consider a combinatorial framework to view the compactification of this space based on the pair-of-pants decomposition of the surface, relating it to the well-known phenomenon of bubbling. This leads to a classification of all such spaces that can be realized as polytopes, capturing elegant hidden algebraic structure from homotopy theory. This talk is accessible to strong undergraduates, based heavily on pictures and concrete examples.